Monotype Prints

Monotype suite of 4 prints, created for Intro to Printmaking, SP25

I created this series of monotype prints as a project for a printmaking class. This suite explores themes of the passage of time, one's personal history, change, and change to capture the beauty and loss that every fleeting moment in our lives carry. I was inspired by my own grandfather, who prays with the ashes from his cigarettes–a small but significant ritual that lives on in his rural Chinese village. To create these prints, I overlayed multiple layers of stenciled and ink-rolled text, chine collé with Japanese paper, and shaped plates to communicate the delicacy and intimacy through the moment of a cigarette burning down to its filter. In the fourth print, the cigarette appears to be completely burnt down but reappears in a different form, through ashes that I mixed in with trans base, to show that while "everything is changing", we still carry the past in the same breath as our present. This is the beauty of life–how we become the people we are slowly through the people and things that came before us. By combining these printmaking techniques with personal images and intentional color choices that evoke warmth and hope, I wanted to create a visual narrative that plays on my own heritage while also inviting viewers to understand the way each of our personal histories affect us and move with us in every small and slow moment in our fast-paced lives